Study: Mass exodus over Facebook privacy flap won’t happen

Privacy issues won’t cause a mass exodus from Facebook on May 31, but people are being more careful about how they use the popular social network, a new poll said.

While 57 percent of American Facebook users were aware of recent news stories about the controversy over its privacy policies, only about 2 percent planned to go along with a campaign to delete their accounts on May 31, according to Vision Critical, a research and technology company in Vancouver, British Columbia.

The United States accounts for about 30 percent of Facebook’s more than 400 million members worldwide, and there are indications the Palo Alto company is rapidly closing in on 500 million. So the poll would indicate more than 2.4 million Americans plan to quit Facebook.

However, two sites set up to get people to pledge to quit on or by May 31 had no where near that number.

And LeaveFacebook, which asked people to pledge to delete their accounts “only if 10,000 other Facebook users” do the same, had just 299 pledges.

The poll results were supposed to be a representative sample based on the 699 people Vision Critical questioned on May 25, the day before Facebook began rolling out new, simpler privacy controls. Matt Kleinschmit, Vision Critical’s senior vice president of media, said it was hard to say how those new controls would have affected the study.

“We do have the one data point that indicates that people seem to feel that Facebook is doing a good job dealing with privacy issues, so that makes me think that while users may concerned about their privacy and are being more cautious, they are giving Facebook the benefit of the doubt and feel that the company was on top of this as soon as it became an issue,” Kleinschmit said.

So as with other privacy controversies in the past over features like Facebook Beacon and the introduction of the news feed, it appears Facebook will weather this storm without much damage.

Nevertheless, the poll did show privacy was an important issue.

Of the respondents, 81 percent said they were now using Facebook more carefully and 76 percent said they were not sharing as much personal information as before.